9 ms·

What's that?

201 points by veb 15y ago

tzaman 15y ago
This is actually not a rant - it's a wake up call.
runako 15y ago
I actually think it's not respectful of visitors' time to only describe your site in a video. I know, it's only 30 seconds, but that's about 25 seconds longer than it takes me to read a short text description. And if I need to find my headphones, it's not 30 seconds anymore. What's wrong with writing, anyway?
- kijin 15y ago
  I agree completely. I can't remember how many times I clicked a link on HN, discovered that there was nothing but a video on that page, and just closed the tab. Text is great, pictures are OK, but a video? You just added unnecessary friction. There goes your conversion rate.
- seldo 15y ago
  Enthusiastically seconded. Nothing makes me hit the back button faster on a startup/app website than a mostly-empty page with a video on it. Especially when the video is just a close-up of somebody's face talking, i.e. there's nothing that requires a video to demonstrate.
  - qq66 15y ago
    We have a text description at http://getliveloop.com http://getliveloop.com but to tell you the truth, the video is the easiest, and dare I say, quickest way to understand what we do. The reason we have the text is that our target users are PowerPoint users, who often work in settings where they cannot listen to audio. Obviously a site should have both text and video but I don't blame anyone who does the video first.
    - pavel_lishin 15y ago
      > to tell you the truth, the video is the easiest, and dare I say, quickest way to understand what we do About 20 seconds in, your video says: Liveloop is a simple powerpoint plugin that lets everyone work on the document at the same time, seeing everyone else's changes as they type. That is the quickest way to understand what you do. If I want to see it in action, I can click through to a video demonstration.
      - natrius 15y ago
        A simple A/B test would answer this question.
        PakG1 15y ago
        Out of curiosity, how do you A/B test understanding?
        varikin 15y ago
        A/B testing understanding might not be feasible, but in the end, they are trying to sell their plugin so A/B testing for signups or sales or something like sounds like a good correlation to understanding.
        TeMPOraL 15y ago
        http://untyped.com/untyping/2011/02/11/stop-ab-testing-and-make-out-like-a-bandit/ http://untyped.com/untyping/2011/02/11/stop-ab-testing-and-m...
        neilk 15y ago
        How about doing hallway usability testing? Show the page to people in the target market for five seconds and then ask them "what does this company do?" Five of these will tell you everything you need to know. If you don't have a constant stream of fresh users walking through your offices, you can do something on http://www.usertesting.com/ http://www.usertesting.com/ .
      - 15y ago
  - romansanchez 15y ago
    I'm curious if videos really do scare people away. If you take a look at dropbox and cloudflare they do a really good job at using a video to demonstrate their product. Now taking into consideration the size of dropbox's and cloudflare's users, I'm more inclined to the idea that "videos work".
    - kuahyeow 15y ago
      Not sure about scaring people away, just pushes time-conscious people away, which is true for me personally
    - TeMPOraL 15y ago
      I don't think I have ever seen Dropbox video, even though I have been using it for years.
    - nhebb 15y ago
      It's not that videos scare people away, but they need to be augmented. Would Dropbox convert better if they had descriptive text on their home page, or at least made the features link more visible than the one in the footer? We'll never know unless Dropbox tests it and publishes the results. When I think of software sold to businesses, I'm reminded of the place I used to work where the president had the IT department disable the speakers on all new PC's. He didn't want employees sitting around watching videos or listening to music on company time. It may be hard to fathom for some people, but there are offices where playing videos (even demos) is frowned upon - especially in a cube farm. If you want to make conversions, think of all the barriers between you and the sale, and start knocking them down one by one. Making your products key features readable and crawl-able for search engines is an easy one.
      - kami8845 15y ago
        As someone from the affiliate space where EVERYTHING gets splittested I can tell you that videos generally own all other forms of website content when trying to get the user to do something (download, signup, buy). >Would Dropbox convert better if they had descriptive text on their home page, or at least made the features link more visible than the one in the footer? We'll never know unless Dropbox tests it and publishes the results. of course DB tested their homepage a ton
- pud 15y ago
  To play devil's advocate, the Dropbox homepage is nothing but a big play button w/ video. But I agree not every product needs a video. I agree that using subtitles everywhere is a good thing.
  - derefr 15y ago
    The difference is that Dropbox was a product everyone already understood the concept behind--nobody needed five paragraphs of text to understand "it syncs files"--but was sold entirely on the execution, and how much better that execution was than all the challengers who had failed to penetrate the space before it. And you really can't get execution from a speel. To make a gaming analogy: you can effectively market a JRPG through commercials, because, in essence, what people are buying is the narrative. But you can't market Tetris in a commercial, because what's being bought there is the experience of gameplay. Some things can simply be described; other things can only be shown; and still others need to be played with.
  - mokus 15y ago
    An anecdotal counterpoint: I joined dropbox when I heard from a friend how well-designed it was. I then proceeded to sign up for it _despite_ my frustration at the video-only front page. I never did watch the video.
- bemmu 15y ago
  Not sure what's wrong with writing, but candyjapan.com without a video on the page converted at 0.5% and with video at 1.3%. Of course no reason not to have both video AND text. Granted the contents in the video are not the same as the explanation text is, so might be attributable just to the difference in content. Or possibly just random chance (36 conversions 3784 visits).
  - TeMPOraL 15y ago
    36 conversions/3784 visits sounds like random fluctuations to me. Also, was it video+text, or video instead of text?
    - worldvoyageur 15y ago
      Another way to say conversion went from 0.5% to 1.3% is to say visitors were over 2.5 times more likely to convert if there was video than if there wasn't. In those terms, random fluctuations seem less likely as the reason for the difference.
      - TeMPOraL 15y ago
        Yes, but it's just because it sounds different. IMO both the absolute and relative number of people lay in a range of what I would expect to be random fluctuations.
      - xyzzyrz 15y ago
        FWIW: > chisq.test(matrix(c(10,3784/2,26,3784/2),2,2)) Pearson's Chi-squared test with Yates' continuity correction ... p-value = 0.0129
- jdietrich 15y ago
  What's wrong with writing? A substantial proportion of internet users are functionally illiterate. If your website targets a mass audience, you will be dealing with a large proportion of users (probably about 15%) who have the reading skills of an eighth-grader or worse. They're the great invisible demographic in UX.
ryanbales 15y ago
We just released an app intro video at Budgetable http://budgetable.com http://budgetable.com ... Adding captions didn't even cross my mind, but we'll do it.
- heretohelp 15y ago
  Your site gets a no, there's not enough immediately visible copy for me to determine if the value prop is worth my time. You will never have me as a customer unless you move the video to a non-index page and instead lead in with copy+visuals. Offer a link to the idea for people who want the audiovisual explanation instead.
  - benatkin 15y ago
    There are tradeoffs involved in having some important material below the fold, but I don't think it's universally a bad idea. http://iampaddy.com/lifebelow600/ http://iampaddy.com/lifebelow600/
    - heretohelp 15y ago
      Give a bone less about the fold, I loaded the page, didn't see copy, just a big fat video frame. Closed the page. The fold becomes irrelevant when you give me offensive/non-content above it and no reason to go digging for more. It only makes sense to go ahead and put plenty of content below the fold once you've hooked me and given me a reason to continue. Videos leave me wanting and the browser tab closed. A video frame shouldn't be the first thing I see unless the domain is youtube.com.
  - ryanbales 15y ago
    Hmm... I have to disagree with you here. There is a title and a subtitle above the video. Those two elements provide enough information for the user to determine if they want to watch the video. Captions would still be a plus, though.
    - heretohelp 15y ago
FrancescoRizzi 15y ago
You, sirs and/or ladies have my thanks for bringing this up. You have my vote on this one, no questions asked.
thechut 15y ago
This is a huge problem! I did some work for the Assistive Technology Industry Association (ATIA) and video is very inaccessible. This is a problem not only for people with bad or impaired hearing. Imagine trying to figure out what a video was trying to demonstrate if you were blind! W3C has created the Web Acceptability Initiative (WAI) with the goal of creating a common set of web standards so that all people can access content. Check out the WAI homepage for best practices and code examples: http://www.w3.org/WAI/ http://www.w3.org/WAI/
- read_wharf 15y ago
  I have a feeling I might use the "accessible" version of a page more regularly, if it were widespread enough for people like me who don't need it to be aware of it.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
geuis 15y ago
I'm very confused about why this story has so many votes. spottedsun.com doesn't even resolve for me.
- veb 15y ago
  Weird. Still resolving for me. http://pastie.org/pastes/3645637/text http://pastie.org/pastes/3645637/text
- skeletonjelly 15y ago
  Can you pastebin your nslookup/dig results? Try directing it at another dns 8.8.8.8 nslookup spottedsun.com 8.8.8.8
raldi 15y ago
And even if you don't care about people who are hard of hearing, think about those of us who are at work, or in a public place, and don't have a pair of headphones available.
gus_massa 15y ago
I'm not hearing impaired, but my first language is Spanish. I can read almost anything in English, but sometimes it is difficult for me to understand fast spoken English. So, if you care about international users, you also should add captions to the videos.
john2x 15y ago
And for those who have a slow connection, a video is just a big back button. (speaking from experience)
lucb1e 15y ago
And while we're on it, make sure websites are operable by keyboard too (tab and enter, mostly). What for? Visually impaired people. I know someone who is totally blind, has worked with MS-DOS while he could see, but got blind before Windows 3.1 even came out. Yet he works with and version of Windows, sends and reads email, searches videos on Youtube, and browses the web. That last one is becoming more and more tricky with div-onclick="location=somewhere;" (instead of a-href) and other Javascript all over the place. Screen readers are made to read text. Flash is hard but sometimes possible, Javascript is becoming a good competitor to Flash in the sense of that it's rendering the web almost as inaccessible. Images too are a problem of course, without alt attribute they are totally worthless to blind people. So if you want to present something to the entire market, be sure to have either an accessible website or a mobile version, both preferably in the local language (you should hear how Dutch text to speech software reads English, sounds more like Chinese--literally). And there are about 160 million people blind around the world, even if only a tenth of that speaks English and has internet access, that are 16 million people. Nearly as much as the entire population of the Netherlands.
- dredmorbius 15y ago
  As with the captioning recommendation, enhancements for disabled users are also huge wins with both many other users, and, very often, search engines. I don't know that search engines use tab order to parse fields, but they very well might and could. I know that especially when it comes to web-based admin tools, something that: 1: Works well with keyboard navigation. 2: Works (at all) in a console-mode browser. ... is going to get a hell of a lot more interest from me than something which: 1: Doesn't readily support keyboard nav. 2: Doesn't work in a console-mode browser. 3: Requires Flash. 4: Requires some specific/minimum browser version/release. 5: Requires MSIE. From 3 onwards, these are instant death for any enterprise tool I'm evaluating.
  - lucb1e 15y ago
    Very true, I would also prefer something that works even in a text based browser. I've never really 100% fit in with the user standard, being one of the first to browse the web from my mobile phone (Nokia 6230i back then) or using alternative browsers when MSIE's market share was still >90%. I've had more than enough compatibility trouble to go along with something working on only some systems. (For example I'm currently building a website which will also support everything from high-end desktops to text-based terminals. Only disqus comments are a pain, making the page size go from 23KB to over 500KB and requiring Javascript, but the tradeoff seems worth it--trust me, I thought it trough over and over and over lol.)
dhotson 15y ago
If a video has captions I often prefer to watch it muted. I'm not even hearing impaired. Sound is overrated. ;-)
welp 15y ago
I'm profoundly deaf, and wish I had thought of making this post. I've lost track of the number of times I have been put off a product because their only description is in video form. I sometimes forgive start-ups for not captioning videos, but I think it's inexcusable when a large multinational corporation publishes a video with no captions -- especially if they pay for live captioning for employees in meetings (e.g., by using http://www.captionfirst.com/ http://www.captionfirst.com/).
scintill76 15y ago
At first I was annoyed with the non-descriptive title, but I clicked it anyway to see what it was. I don't know if it was intentional, but the title helps convey how useless audio is to people who can't hear. And even as a non-hearing-impaired person, I concur with the request for subtitles and/or not using videos so much because they waste time.

201 points by veb 15y ago

This is actually not a rant - it's a wake up call.

I actually think it's not respectful of visitors' time to only describe your site in a video. I know, it's only 30 seconds, but that's about 25 seconds longer than it takes me to read a short text description. And if I need to find my headphones, it's not 30 seconds anymore. What's wrong with writing, anyway?

kijin 15y ago
I agree completely. I can't remember how many times I clicked a link on HN, discovered that there was nothing but a video on that page, and just closed the tab. Text is great, pictures are OK, but a video? You just added unnecessary friction. There goes your conversion rate.
seldo 15y ago
Enthusiastically seconded. Nothing makes me hit the back button faster on a startup/app website than a mostly-empty page with a video on it. Especially when the video is just a close-up of somebody's face talking, i.e. there's nothing that requires a video to demonstrate.
- qq66 15y ago
  We have a text description at http://getliveloop.com http://getliveloop.com but to tell you the truth, the video is the easiest, and dare I say, quickest way to understand what we do. The reason we have the text is that our target users are PowerPoint users, who often work in settings where they cannot listen to audio. Obviously a site should have both text and video but I don't blame anyone who does the video first.
  - pavel_lishin 15y ago
    > to tell you the truth, the video is the easiest, and dare I say, quickest way to understand what we do About 20 seconds in, your video says: Liveloop is a simple powerpoint plugin that lets everyone work on the document at the same time, seeing everyone else's changes as they type. That is the quickest way to understand what you do. If I want to see it in action, I can click through to a video demonstration.
    - natrius 15y ago
      A simple A/B test would answer this question.
      - PakG1 15y ago
        Out of curiosity, how do you A/B test understanding?
        varikin 15y ago
        A/B testing understanding might not be feasible, but in the end, they are trying to sell their plugin so A/B testing for signups or sales or something like sounds like a good correlation to understanding.
      - TeMPOraL 15y ago
        http://untyped.com/untyping/2011/02/11/stop-ab-testing-and-make-out-like-a-bandit/ http://untyped.com/untyping/2011/02/11/stop-ab-testing-and-m...
      - neilk 15y ago
        How about doing hallway usability testing? Show the page to people in the target market for five seconds and then ask them "what does this company do?" Five of these will tell you everything you need to know. If you don't have a constant stream of fresh users walking through your offices, you can do something on http://www.usertesting.com/ http://www.usertesting.com/ .
    - 15y ago
- romansanchez 15y ago
  I'm curious if videos really do scare people away. If you take a look at dropbox and cloudflare they do a really good job at using a video to demonstrate their product. Now taking into consideration the size of dropbox's and cloudflare's users, I'm more inclined to the idea that "videos work".
  - kuahyeow 15y ago
    Not sure about scaring people away, just pushes time-conscious people away, which is true for me personally
  - TeMPOraL 15y ago
    I don't think I have ever seen Dropbox video, even though I have been using it for years.
  - nhebb 15y ago
    It's not that videos scare people away, but they need to be augmented. Would Dropbox convert better if they had descriptive text on their home page, or at least made the features link more visible than the one in the footer? We'll never know unless Dropbox tests it and publishes the results. When I think of software sold to businesses, I'm reminded of the place I used to work where the president had the IT department disable the speakers on all new PC's. He didn't want employees sitting around watching videos or listening to music on company time. It may be hard to fathom for some people, but there are offices where playing videos (even demos) is frowned upon - especially in a cube farm. If you want to make conversions, think of all the barriers between you and the sale, and start knocking them down one by one. Making your products key features readable and crawl-able for search engines is an easy one.
    - kami8845 15y ago
      As someone from the affiliate space where EVERYTHING gets splittested I can tell you that videos generally own all other forms of website content when trying to get the user to do something (download, signup, buy). >Would Dropbox convert better if they had descriptive text on their home page, or at least made the features link more visible than the one in the footer? We'll never know unless Dropbox tests it and publishes the results. of course DB tested their homepage a ton
pud 15y ago
To play devil's advocate, the Dropbox homepage is nothing but a big play button w/ video. But I agree not every product needs a video. I agree that using subtitles everywhere is a good thing.
- derefr 15y ago
  The difference is that Dropbox was a product everyone already understood the concept behind--nobody needed five paragraphs of text to understand "it syncs files"--but was sold entirely on the execution, and how much better that execution was than all the challengers who had failed to penetrate the space before it. And you really can't get execution from a speel. To make a gaming analogy: you can effectively market a JRPG through commercials, because, in essence, what people are buying is the narrative. But you can't market Tetris in a commercial, because what's being bought there is the experience of gameplay. Some things can simply be described; other things can only be shown; and still others need to be played with.
- mokus 15y ago
  An anecdotal counterpoint: I joined dropbox when I heard from a friend how well-designed it was. I then proceeded to sign up for it _despite_ my frustration at the video-only front page. I never did watch the video.
bemmu 15y ago
Not sure what's wrong with writing, but candyjapan.com without a video on the page converted at 0.5% and with video at 1.3%. Of course no reason not to have both video AND text. Granted the contents in the video are not the same as the explanation text is, so might be attributable just to the difference in content. Or possibly just random chance (36 conversions 3784 visits).
- TeMPOraL 15y ago
  36 conversions/3784 visits sounds like random fluctuations to me. Also, was it video+text, or video instead of text?
  - worldvoyageur 15y ago
    Another way to say conversion went from 0.5% to 1.3% is to say visitors were over 2.5 times more likely to convert if there was video than if there wasn't. In those terms, random fluctuations seem less likely as the reason for the difference.
    - TeMPOraL 15y ago
      Yes, but it's just because it sounds different. IMO both the absolute and relative number of people lay in a range of what I would expect to be random fluctuations.
    - xyzzyrz 15y ago
      FWIW: > chisq.test(matrix(c(10,3784/2,26,3784/2),2,2)) Pearson's Chi-squared test with Yates' continuity correction ... p-value = 0.0129
jdietrich 15y ago
What's wrong with writing? A substantial proportion of internet users are functionally illiterate. If your website targets a mass audience, you will be dealing with a large proportion of users (probably about 15%) who have the reading skills of an eighth-grader or worse. They're the great invisible demographic in UX.

ryanbales 15y ago

We just released an app intro video at Budgetable http://budgetable.com http://budgetable.com ... Adding captions didn't even cross my mind, but we'll do it.

heretohelp 15y ago
Your site gets a no, there's not enough immediately visible copy for me to determine if the value prop is worth my time. You will never have me as a customer unless you move the video to a non-index page and instead lead in with copy+visuals. Offer a link to the idea for people who want the audiovisual explanation instead.
- benatkin 15y ago
  There are tradeoffs involved in having some important material below the fold, but I don't think it's universally a bad idea. http://iampaddy.com/lifebelow600/ http://iampaddy.com/lifebelow600/
  - heretohelp 15y ago
    Give a bone less about the fold, I loaded the page, didn't see copy, just a big fat video frame. Closed the page. The fold becomes irrelevant when you give me offensive/non-content above it and no reason to go digging for more. It only makes sense to go ahead and put plenty of content below the fold once you've hooked me and given me a reason to continue. Videos leave me wanting and the browser tab closed. A video frame shouldn't be the first thing I see unless the domain is youtube.com.
- ryanbales 15y ago
  Hmm... I have to disagree with you here. There is a title and a subtitle above the video. Those two elements provide enough information for the user to determine if they want to watch the video. Captions would still be a plus, though.
  - heretohelp 15y ago

FrancescoRizzi 15y ago

You, sirs and/or ladies have my thanks for bringing this up. You have my vote on this one, no questions asked.

thechut 15y ago

This is a huge problem! I did some work for the Assistive Technology Industry Association (ATIA) and video is very inaccessible. This is a problem not only for people with bad or impaired hearing. Imagine trying to figure out what a video was trying to demonstrate if you were blind! W3C has created the Web Acceptability Initiative (WAI) with the goal of creating a common set of web standards so that all people can access content. Check out the WAI homepage for best practices and code examples: http://www.w3.org/WAI/ http://www.w3.org/WAI/

read_wharf 15y ago
I have a feeling I might use the "accessible" version of a page more regularly, if it were widespread enough for people like me who don't need it to be aware of it.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

geuis 15y ago

I'm very confused about why this story has so many votes. spottedsun.com doesn't even resolve for me.

veb 15y ago
Weird. Still resolving for me. http://pastie.org/pastes/3645637/text http://pastie.org/pastes/3645637/text
skeletonjelly 15y ago
Can you pastebin your nslookup/dig results? Try directing it at another dns 8.8.8.8 nslookup spottedsun.com 8.8.8.8

raldi 15y ago

And even if you don't care about people who are hard of hearing, think about those of us who are at work, or in a public place, and don't have a pair of headphones available.

gus_massa 15y ago

I'm not hearing impaired, but my first language is Spanish. I can read almost anything in English, but sometimes it is difficult for me to understand fast spoken English. So, if you care about international users, you also should add captions to the videos.

john2x 15y ago

And for those who have a slow connection, a video is just a big back button. (speaking from experience)

lucb1e 15y ago

And while we're on it, make sure websites are operable by keyboard too (tab and enter, mostly). What for? Visually impaired people. I know someone who is totally blind, has worked with MS-DOS while he could see, but got blind before Windows 3.1 even came out. Yet he works with and version of Windows, sends and reads email, searches videos on Youtube, and browses the web. That last one is becoming more and more tricky with div-onclick="location=somewhere;" (instead of a-href) and other Javascript all over the place. Screen readers are made to read text. Flash is hard but sometimes possible, Javascript is becoming a good competitor to Flash in the sense of that it's rendering the web almost as inaccessible. Images too are a problem of course, without alt attribute they are totally worthless to blind people. So if you want to present something to the entire market, be sure to have either an accessible website or a mobile version, both preferably in the local language (you should hear how Dutch text to speech software reads English, sounds more like Chinese--literally). And there are about 160 million people blind around the world, even if only a tenth of that speaks English and has internet access, that are 16 million people. Nearly as much as the entire population of the Netherlands.

dredmorbius 15y ago
As with the captioning recommendation, enhancements for disabled users are also huge wins with both many other users, and, very often, search engines. I don't know that search engines use tab order to parse fields, but they very well might and could. I know that especially when it comes to web-based admin tools, something that: 1: Works well with keyboard navigation. 2: Works (at all) in a console-mode browser. ... is going to get a hell of a lot more interest from me than something which: 1: Doesn't readily support keyboard nav. 2: Doesn't work in a console-mode browser. 3: Requires Flash. 4: Requires some specific/minimum browser version/release. 5: Requires MSIE. From 3 onwards, these are instant death for any enterprise tool I'm evaluating.
- lucb1e 15y ago
  Very true, I would also prefer something that works even in a text based browser. I've never really 100% fit in with the user standard, being one of the first to browse the web from my mobile phone (Nokia 6230i back then) or using alternative browsers when MSIE's market share was still >90%. I've had more than enough compatibility trouble to go along with something working on only some systems. (For example I'm currently building a website which will also support everything from high-end desktops to text-based terminals. Only disqus comments are a pain, making the page size go from 23KB to over 500KB and requiring Javascript, but the tradeoff seems worth it--trust me, I thought it trough over and over and over lol.)

dhotson 15y ago

If a video has captions I often prefer to watch it muted. I'm not even hearing impaired. Sound is overrated. ;-)

welp 15y ago

I'm profoundly deaf, and wish I had thought of making this post. I've lost track of the number of times I have been put off a product because their only description is in video form. I sometimes forgive start-ups for not captioning videos, but I think it's inexcusable when a large multinational corporation publishes a video with no captions -- especially if they pay for live captioning for employees in meetings (e.g., by using http://www.captionfirst.com/ http://www.captionfirst.com/).

scintill76 15y ago

At first I was annoyed with the non-descriptive title, but I clicked it anyway to see what it was. I don't know if it was intentional, but the title helps convey how useless audio is to people who can't hear. And even as a non-hearing-impaired person, I concur with the request for subtitles and/or not using videos so much because they waste time.